The Real Story of the Shutdown: 50 Years of GOP Race-Baiting

On the day the Affordable Care Act takes effect, the U.S. government
is shut down, and it may be permanently broken. You’ll read lots of
explanations for the dysfunction, but the simple truth is this: It’s the
culmination of 50 years of evolving yet consistent Republican strategy
to depict government as the enemy, an oppressor that works primarily as
the protector of and provider for African-Americans, to the detriment of
everyone else. The fact that everything came apart under our first
African-American president wasn’t an accident, it was probably
inevitable.

People talk about the role of race in Richard Nixon’s
“Southern Strategy”: how Pat Buchanan and Kevin Phillips helped him lure
the old Dixiecrats into the Republican Party permanently. Far less well
known was the GOP’s “Northern Strategy,” which targeted so-called white
ethnics – many of them from the Catholic “Sidewalks of New York” like
my working-class family, in the words of Kevin Phillips. Without a
Northern Strategy designed to inflame white-ethnic fears of racial and
economic change, Phillips’ imaginary but still influential notion of a
“permanent Republican majority” would have been unimaginable.

“The
principal force which broke up the Democratic (New Deal) coalition is
the Negro socioeconomic revolution and liberal Democratic ideological
inability to cope with it,” Phillips wrote. “Democratic ‘Great Society’
programs aligned that party with many Negro demands, but the party was
unable to defuse the racial tension sundering the nation.” Phillips was
not trying to defuse that tension, far from it – he was trying to lure
those white ethnics to the GOP (although he later broke with the party
he helped create.) But his Northern Strategy truly came to fruition in
1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan. Where Nixon swept the South,
Reagan was able to take much of the North and West, too....